The Fun of Getting Thin, Samuel G. Blythe [new ebook reader .txt] 📗

on that program—and that is my program indefinitely.

There are certain economic phases of a campaign of this kind that should be mentioned. It is expensive. Not one item of clothing, save my hat, socks and shoes, which fitted me last January is of the slightest use to me now. I didn't get to cutting down clothes until I was sure I would stick. Since that time the tailors have had a picnic at my expense. My shirts were too big. Instead of wearing a seventeen-and-three-quarters collar, I now wear a sixteen-and-three-quarters. My waist is seven inches smaller. I even had to have a seal ring I wear cut down so it would not slip off my finger. While in the transition stage I looked like a scarecrow. My clothes hung on me like bags.

Since I have had my clothes re-made and new ones constructed I am an object of continual comment among my friends. They all marvel at my changed appearance. They are all solicitous about my health. They do not see how a man can take off more than fifty pounds and not hurt himself. I do not see how he can keep it on and not kill himself. They tell me I look like a boy—and I feel like one. I'm as active as I was twenty years ago. When I was in the mountains this summer, at an altitude of seventy-five hundred feet, I could climb slopes with no exhaustion that I couldn't have gone fifteen feet up the year before. My mind is clearer; my body is better. I figure I have added a good many years to my life.

And all this time I have had everything I wanted to eat, but not all I wanted to eat until I got myself readjusted to the new system. I missed the alcohol at first, but that is all over now. It was a part of the game and I used to think a necessary part. I have cured myself of that delusion. If there is a thing on earth the matter with me the ablest doctors in this country can't find out what it is. I am a rejuvenated, reconstructed person, no longer fat, aged forty-three—and the White Man's Hope!

As to the exercise end of it, there wasn't any exercise end. It happened that I met a man last March, when I was in the first throes of this campaign, who had made some study of the human body. I liked him because he was modest about what he knew, and not a faddist. We talked about exercise. He told me one thing that stuck. He said: "Walk a little every day. If you have half an hour walk a mile. If you have an hour walk two miles. Don't try to see how many miles you can walk in the half-hour or the hour, but take your time. Look at things as you go along. Be leisurely about it. When a man goes out for a walk and walks as hard as he can or does anything else in the shape of exercise as hard as he can he is subjecting himself to just as much nerve strain as he can subject himself to in any other way. Be calm about your walking, or whatever else you do."

Formerly it had been my custom to plug out after breakfast and gallop three or four miles as hard as I could and then go to work. I cut that out. I walked an easy, leisurely mile or two miles, looking at the trees and flowers and watching the people and looking into shop windows, and I got a lot of good out of it. Then it grew hot, and I cut my walking to half a mile or so down to my office in the morning and back at night. Occasionally, after dinner, I would walk a couple of miles. This summer I went fishing and tramped about some, but not much. In reality, I had no scheme of exercise, and I took little. I didn't need it. I didn't have masses of food and drink in me to be burned up. I was normal.

As I said, I suppose all this is absurdly unscientific—and I don't give a hoot if it is. It worked for me. I don't know whether it will work for any other person on this earth. Nor do I care. If you want to try it on, provided you are fat, here are the specifications: I assume it is an axiom that we all eat too much. I know I did—about sixty per cent too much. Still, I guarantee nothing. I make no claims. I have set down the facts; and the only warning, advice or admonition I have to give is that any person who makes up his mind to try this method and thinks he isn't in for the hardest struggle of his life would do well not to try. This isn't a frolic. It's a fight.

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